


a thing divine

by subcas



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Related, Episode Related, Gen, M/M, Missing Scene, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-09-21 12:46:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subcas/pseuds/subcas
Summary: During 14.01, Dean and Michael have a talk.





	1. Chapter 1

“Gabriel. Always Gabriel.” Michael sounded disappointed. Those with impossible standards often are. Dean might have thought Cas had a stick up his ass when he first met him, but it was nothing compared to the steel beam Michael had rammed so far up his that it shot a constant stream of sanctimony out of his mouth.

“What?” It wasn’t his best line but Michael bothering to talk to Dean about his constant disappointment, or anything else for that matter, was unusual, so cut him some slack. The current state of existence of his throat was, at best, liminal, but somehow it still felt creaky from disuse, like he'd just woken up from an unplanned nap, and was trying to blink his brain back on. Being a prisoner inside your own mind was trippy—in a ‘I think I dropped the wrong mushrooms and I’m about to die’ kind of way, unfortunately. Dean tried not to think about it too much. But that was hard when there wasn’t anything to do but think. The ontological implications alone could keep philosophers self-pleasuring for a hundred years. _He is me but I am not me._

The overall texture of possession was like being asleep—without any of the pleasant connotations that might imply. A vasty nothingness, impacted with bright flashes of lucidity, but not control. He only sometimes could see what Michael was doing, and he only sometimes could hold onto what he saw. Dean floated, semi-coherent, pickled in the brine Michael’s feelings (which he was sure he would insist he didn’t have) and interpreting what they were was like trying to read the world’s most complicated mood ring. Only the consequences were on a world-ending scale.

He’d caught today’s meeting which had so nettled Michael though. How like him to declare the only way to peace was through a war. Therefore, to renounce the war was to lose the right to care. To love was to fight. 

But Dean had never loved the fight itself half as much as those he fought it for. War would never be his mistress. And much as he would never see otherwise, Michael had baser motives too. He had punished Jamil for desertion but Dean had felt the needle-prick of irritation when he’d named Gabriel below God but before Michael. He could come second to the Father, but not his brother.

“The messenger.” Michael’s lip—his lip, really, but, hey, who’s counting—curled in distaste. “Forever famous for telling a woman she was pregnant. Of course you humans remember _that_.”

“Blame your dad,” Dean said, in the casually insulting way he talked about fathers other than his own. 

Michael’s glare could curdle milk. Which wasn’t saying much, come to think of it, since it could do much worse. “No.”

“So, what, you’re jealous Gabriel gets better press than you?” Dean rolled his eyes. At least, in his mind’s eye, he did. Him _qua_ Michael remained stone-faced. Dean had raged and thrown himself against the walls the first few days without wresting so much as a flicker of control from Michael. Knowing it could be done hadn’t made doing it any easier. “The humans like him more than you? Build a bridge and get over yourself, Mike.”

Michael ignored him, which was what he spent most of his time with Dean doing. “I was the loyal soldier. When my father left, I fought in His name—for the sake of His favorites—for a thousand years while Gabriel abandoned his post to consort with – with pagans and their ilk.” He could taste Michael’s disgust sour in his mouth. It gave the air a creamy lemon sheen. “But it was him they prayed to. It was him they cried out for. Him the other angels asked for. ‘Michael, Michael, where is Gabriel?’ Am I my brother’s keeper? I was there, as I always was, but all they wanted was the one who ran away.”

“I got a speech like that from Gabriel once,” Dean muttered. _Loyal to an absent father_ , he had said. Did this Michael have any loyalties left? “Hey! Maybe you two are related after all.”

“Selfish. Venal. Too weak to take up his sword when it mattered most,” Michael continued, like he hadn’t spoken. Angels were consummate monologuers. Everything they had to say they wanted to declaim. That’s what happened when humans fell to their knees and wrote your words into holy books with trembling fingers every time you spoke. Or so Dean assumed. When it happened to him, it had been more vaguely, then acutely, irritating. Though the nature of Chuck’s trembling had more to do with DTs than a desire to genuflect.

It figured that giving a fuck would be what got Gabriel into trouble. Of all the wide variety of shit he pulled—the murder, the mayhem, the polytheism—the one thing that raised him in Dean’s estimation _would_ be what was unforgivable to Michael. “Yeah, well, unlike you, he had something against killing his family.” 

He expected he’d ignore that jab too, but he didn’t. “That’s funny.” If it was, he didn’t show it. Every face Michael made was cruel. “No angel has spilled more of their brothers’ blood than your Castiel. Not even me.” 

“Don’t talk about him,” Dean said, the spark of his anger immediate despite knowing this was exactly the sort of thing Michael wanted to provoke. If knowing something was stupid before doing it stopped him, he’d never get much done.

“How many of them did he kill just for you?” Michael spread his arms out in consideration, like he was weighing things reasonably and not being a jackass of the Lord. “He bled Heaven dry.”

“You don’t know anything.” But Cas had said as much to him, once, though eventually he’d stopped saying it. 

Michael tapped the side of Dean’s head, over the stupid hat he’d put on it. “Of course I do. I know everything.”

“Knowing is different than knowing,” Dean hissed. It felt like an insult for Michael to claim understanding of Castiel through the flipbook of Dean’s mind. It felt like a violation for him to see them at all.

“No.” Michael frowned at his illogic. “It isn’t.”

“Look, peeping tom, you can fondle through my memories all you like, but that doesn’t mean you know anything about why they happened.”

“Of course. You’re going to tell me about love.” Michael made a face like he’d just stepped in dog shit.

“Gross,” Dean said, heart-or-facsimile-thereof hammering. “No, you pervert.”

“So you don’t love him?” Michael asked, mockery disguised as curiosity.

Incorporeal or not, he could still feel his cheeks reddening. The innate wiring of shame overpowered the fact that he didn’t currently possess any blood vessels. He opened his mouth to say... what? He didn’t know.

“But he loves _you_. He even told you so.” Michael snapped his fingers. He didn’t have Gabriel’s showmanship, but Dean really wished all the archangels didn’t know the same tricks.

He said, “Wait—” but it was already too late. They dropped into the memory.


	2. Chapter 2

Cas was sprawled on the couch in front of him. Memory him. This was getting confusing, as there was currently three versions of him present. 

There was the him of the past kneeling in front of Cas, pretending desperately that he didn’t know he was dying: nothing more than a movie reel, the best 3D technology that never will be. There was Michael, still borrowing his form as he watched the scene in front of him with an ugly little smirk. And there was himself, granted back a copy of himself for these little mind-jaunts. 

All three Deans stared at Cas.

His skin had an ugly grey undertone, the pallor of a dead man walking. Or, sitting, in this case. His hands were stained red, pressed against the soaked-through bandage on his side, and there was more blood everywhere he looked—which wasn’t nearly as worrying as the black poison eating through him. It was still worrying though. Dean, intellectually, might know that Cas can’t bleed out, but it would comfort him a lot if he’d stop trying.

“This one dies a lot,” Michael said, detached and disappointed as if Cas was a scientific specimen ruining his hypothesis. “My Castiel only died once.”

It felt like a bowling ball descending down his ribcage until the weight crushed into the cradle of his stomach. “What?”

Michael raised his hand again and the memory paused, like this was all a movie scene he didn’t want to ruin with his conversation. The stilled Dean was staring at Cas with such naked grief that it felt shameful to look at. 

“He didn’t tell you?” Michael asked with holier-than-thou dismissiveness. “What, surely it must have occurred to you that there could be one of him in my world, too, with all these extras running around?”

It had occurred to him. But some things were better not to think about.

“Who didn’t tell me?” Dean asked, despite having a pretty good idea.

Michael stretched his arm towards the tableau in front of them where Cas was failing to meet Dean’s eyes. All these years, and he still hadn’t gotten any better at hiding when he had something to hide. And Dean kept missing it anyway.

“A troublemaker in every universe, it seems,” the very gleam of teeth in his smile was malicious, “but I found a use for him, in the end.”

There was a cut high on Cas’s cheekbone. Such a little thing, in the scheme of it. How many times had Dean seen him hurt and healed anew? Dangerous, when it starts to make him believe he’ll never leave. “What did you do to him?” he said dully.

“I fixed him,” Michael said with relish.

Dean ground his teeth together and then stayed silent, knowing that—like every movie villain—Michael couldn’t resist well-placed exposition. He wanted to hurt him, and he knew he would. He wouldn’t be savoring the moment so much otherwise.

“He was too good of a soldier to kill, but too insubordinate to be allowed to live.” Michael paused, an expression Dean can’t recognize on his own face. “Like a metal with an impurity within, a flaw that weakens the whole structure. With the correct tools, you can always remove the defect. Though the original material may not remain the same on a molecular level, as it were.”

“And Cas’s flaw?”

“Love,” Michael drawled, as ever contemptuous of the idea. “For humankind. Or some similar drivel. He didn’t think our mission just.”

“Killing humans?” snarled Dean.

“Killing _demons_ ,” Michael said. “An angel’s mission, even when there are human casualties. The cost of Paradise.”

“Some fucking paradise.”

“It would have been. If not for traitors.” Dean was blanketed the smothering softness of true belief that surrounded these words. The crisp white deadening thrum of faith. It was the vibrating novacaine numb that Michael pulled around himself the most. 

Dean just felt pissed.

“So, Castiel didn’t see a giant graveyard as paradise, and you killed him, is that it?”

“You’re not a very good listener, Dean,” said Michael, with condescending pedagogical patience as if he’s a student being purposefully obtuse or just too stupid to learn. “I’m not the one who killed Castiel. I already told you I found a use for him. Dead angels don’t tend to be very useful.”

“Right, right, I forgot. You _fixed_ him,” Dean said, reflexively sarcastic. “Like he’s some broken axe.”

“More like a hammer,” Michael said. “I gave him back belief. Isn’t that a gift? Insubordination, flouting orders. It all comes from not believing in your mission. I took away his doubts.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure. Torture is convincing.” 

Even as he said it he remembered: Cas, freshly returned to Jimmy’s body—the squirming relief he’d felt at the familiarity of it, even as everything else was falling to pieces around Sam’s blood-stained teeth—turning sharply on his heel away from Dean. Cas, eyes gleaming in the dark, begging Dean not to ask him any more questions he couldn’t answer in Bobby’s scrapyard. Cas, an obsequious half-step behind Zachariah, guiltily unable to hold his gaze. Cas, who came back despite it all. _I can’t_ , he’d said, but then he’d done it anyway. Whatever convincing torture had done, it was never enough to change his convictions.

“I trust in your expertise,” Michael said, mild because malice wouldn’t make it hurt more. “But such blunt instruments aren’t suitable for angels. Pain is so finite. No, I changed his mind.”

“You—” Dean choked on the implications of that benign phrasing. “You fucking brainwashed him, you mean.”

Michael raised his hand. Dean flinched, which seemed to lightly amuse him, but all that happened was the memory resumed.

“You’re my family,” Cas says, lip trembling. “I love you.” It had felt like being gutted with a fillet knife. A slice through his soft underbelly and then a hook pulling the shiny spill of his insides out. It still does.

“Some things are beyond repair,” Michael said, disgust twisting his mouth. “A pity. A weapon like Castiel could be useful in this world.”

Dean wanted to hit him until he couldn’t tell they shared the same face anymore. “If you even breathe the same air as him I’ll—”

Michael cuts him off, bored. “Doesn’t it get tiresome for you? Making empty threats?”

“No,” Dean said. He smiled in the shiteating sort of way that had gotten him eyeballed by authority figures in every state in the union.

“It does for me,” Michael informs him, and, god, the last time he’d seen a look that prissy on himself was when Zachariah had turned him into Gordon Gekko-lite. Angels. 

“Guess we’re not MFEO after all,” Dean said. “Bummer.”

“We are not,” Michael said, “‘made for each other,’” and the air quotes were a lot more charming when Cas was the one doing them. And Cas wasn't exactly charm central, either. “ _You_ were made for _me_. And you should remember your place.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been very good at that.” Dean shrugged loosely. “Think I’ll pass.”

“This is your destiny.” He paused. “Despite its circuitous route.”

“I don’t have a destiny,” Dean bit out. “Whatever bitch fit you’re planning on throwing isn’t preordained. Saying yes was my choice, dumbass one or not. Whatever you do next will be yours. Not God’s will. Nobody but you.”

“You’re wrong, Dean.” Michael was almost glowing with contentment, far more foreboding than his anger. “I failed in my world. I defeated the Serpent, but it was too late. His corruption had spread too far. I couldn’t root it out, surrounded as I was by disbelievers and traitors. But He has given me a second chance in His mercy. I will not fail again. The battle will be won.”

Before getting stuck as a backseat driver in Michael’s head, Dean thought he must be full of shit. Nothing more than a sadist clothed in pious garb. Now he knew. It was much worse. He believed. Michael longed for the path to righteousness, but with no one left to guide him towards it but himself, he simply defaulted to self-righteous. 

Michael, benevolently brimming, turned back to examine Dean’s stalled memory and said, “It was your Castiel that killed mine.”

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen it coming. Still, the words gave him the lurching feeling of missing a step.

“And he will reap the whirlwind,” he murmured, mostly to himself. Then he snapped his fingers and the memory disappeared. No more need for visual aids, the day’s lesson was over.

Dean balled his hands into fists. _Get out_ , he thinks venomously. The lights in the room flicker.

“What?” Michael sounded shocked.

“GET—”

Michael waves his hand sharply, like he’s swatting a fly, and Dean’s teeth jar together painfully as his jaw slams shut. “You aren’t strong enough for this,” he warned, but Dean could see the nervous tic around his right eye—the one Dad had trained out of him so he could bluff at poker. Michael, it seemed, had his tells.

_I’m going to kill you_ , he thought. He could feel his rage like a column of flame in his throat.

For a second, fear flashed across Michael’s face. For once, a familiar expression on a face made unfamiliar. Then: the beat of wings, the peculiar sound of air displacement, and he is in front of Dean. He stretches out his hand.

“Go back to sleep,” he commanded.

And Dean does. Everything gone, snuffed out to black.

**Author's Note:**

> the first episode is all i've seen of this season, so i don't know if any of this lines up with canon (and i don't especially care). unbetaed, so please let me know if you find any errors.
> 
> —
> 
> _I might call him_  
>  _A thing divine, for nothing natural_  
>  _I ever saw so noble._  
>  _— **The Tempest (1.2.498-500)** , William Shakespeare_


End file.
